just wondering: i've got an hour long clip that i imported into FCP; since i was going on a short trip, i thought i'd start the transcoding/analysis step. well, i'm back after 3 days and it's only 95% done! three days and nights??? is that normal? seems way too long but i'll listen to cooler heads.

thanks.

*** i watched it run from 95% to done; it's finally done. unbelievably long. does the mac mini go to sleep when not in use? could that be why it took so long???

One hour of video is going to take a long time. Yes if you put it in sleep mode it will not carry on.
When you got FCP-X open and transcoding material make sure all your other applications are not open this will help to speed things up.

You could fire up Console and look at the logs, which will show you when it went to sleep and when it woke up.

If I'm running something that's going to take a while, I always do set sleep to never (which means remembering to set it back, but that's another matter).

Thanks for suggestion; am so busy now but will check it out tonight; I didn't change any settings regarding sleep but if the mini by default goes to sleep after X amount of time, then that's the problem; I had no other apps running (and the original file is on an external drive) but I doubt those were the key factors; most likely scenario is that it went to sleep and ceased working; Ugh!

*** Apparently, by default, it's set to sleep after X minutes of non-use BUT why would it go to sleep when FCP X is working hard at transcoding? Lesson learned: the next time, I'll set it to never sleep. Thanks guys.